The timeless photography of Greta Buysse
| Greta Buysse loves mise en scène, accumulating and associating,
a hint of Baroque, tension, retro. Sometimes she cherishes
apparently worthless things, but with a whole life behind them,
and she integrates them in a work of art. With a cautious,
groping sensitivity she often in an inimitable way records the
timeless grandeur of locations with departed glory. Looking and
finding are her great virtue, the patience of Job and technical
bravura are admirable: Weather-beaten walls full of notes, paint
which is peeling off and traces of time, man and decadence which
can tell long stories. This is one aspect of Buysse’s oeuvre. Another is the beauty of woman. Sometimes sensually provocative, revealing and concealing at the same time |
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Usually draped in
veils. The striking thing is that when Buysse drapes female
beauty or work on the skin, she is really sculpting. Love, life
and death… Letters, feathers. Corks, cages, Magritte. Buysse
associations. The lap of women who is draped and lying on her
side. At first glance an abstract painting or a shining marble
picture with extremely tense folds, but at the same time – the
fascinating play of light and shadow in the slope – unmistakably
a “lap” and never more feminine. In certain of her works, which
are puzzled back together in framed square parts – which give
the work a distinct dimension – on occasion Buysse plays with
light so virtuously that her protagonists even remain visible in
the dark! The white wings of a dark angel…
Furthermore, Buysse in her scrupulously produced tableaux –
nothing is left to coincidence or one of her cats could unwant
demand a supporting role – more than once betrays her preference
for Surrealism, the fantastic. Work such as “Hommage à Magritte”
expresses fascination.
More than ever, Buysse is in the foreground as a sculptor here.
The skin has become stone, the woman now an absolute picture,
made out of one big lump of clay through which a fracture runs
over her entire body from her neck to her Venus mount. There is
not only the unlikely presence of a third dimension, but also a
play of lines, shadow and signs, white and black and above all
capturing light: the result of an amalgam of acquired and
combined techniques.
Initially Buysse practiced with her own writing. She was never
short of a sharp, quick or sensitive scribbled note and as a
result has a rich supply of hardly legible fragments of personal
revelations. Now she succeeds in incorporating bodies in stone
and texts for eternity, she writes fewer letters. Her
photographic ability is developed to such a degree that she can
entrust her inner stirrings to her work. No one can read it,
although it is artistically immortalized. Looking carefully, the
worn-out, empty chair tells a whole (life) story, tells more
than people and letters could ever say.
(Johan Debruyne)